. She stood aside now from
the door. "It was kind of you to bring me home and talk with me for a
little while."

But it seems that her recovery of spirits did not last out the night.
Doubts assailed her--Harry Luttrell was beneath other skies with other
preoccupations and no message from him had ever come to her. Even if
his love was unchanged at Stockholm, it might not be so now. Hillyard
rang her up on the telephone the next morning and warm in his sympathy
asked her to lunch with him. But it was a pitiful little voice which
replied to him. Stella Croyle answered from her bed. She was not well.
She would stay in bed for a day and then go to a little cottage which
she owned in the country. She would see Hillyard again next year when he
returned from the East.

"Yes, that's her way," said Sir Charles Hardiman. He met Hillyard the
day before he sailed for Port Said and questioned him about Stella
Croyle discreetly. "She runs to earth when she's unhappy. We shall not
see her for a couple of months. No one will."

CHAPTER V

HILLYARD'S MESSENGER

Hillyard turned his back upon the pools of the Khor Galagu at the end of
April and wandered slowly down the River Dinder. From time to time his
shikari would lead his camels and camp-servants out on to an open
clearing on the high river bank and announce a name still marked upon
the maps. Once there had been a village here, before the Kalifa sent his
soldiers and herded the tribes into the towns for his better security.
Now there was no sign anywhere of habitation. The red boles of the
mimosa trees, purple-brown cracked earth, yellow stubble of burnt grass,
the skimming of myriads of birds above the tree-tops and shy wild
animals gliding noiselessly in the dark of the forest--there was nothing
more now. It seemed that no human foot had ever trodden that region.

Hillyard's holiday was coming to an end, for in a month the rainy season
would begin and this great park become a marsh. He went fluctuating
between an excited eagerness for a renewal of rivalry and the
interchange of ideas and the companionship of women; and a reluctance to
leave a country which had so restored him to physical well-being. Never
had he been so strong. He had recaptured, after his five years of London
confinement, the swift spring of the muscles, the immediate response of
the body to the demand made upon it, and the glorious cessation of
fatigue when after arduous hours of heat and exertion h